Clay Stones

Manimal Vinyl; 2010

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The Knife are one of the more celebrated acts to emerge in electronic music over the last decade, in large part because their sound is so distinctive. That's not to say Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer don't have influences, but the music they've created still feels deeply their own. Predictably enough, soundalikes have been slow in surfacing.

Los Angeles-based electro-poppers We Are the World are one of the first groups to gain traction with a sound that invites comparisons to the Knife. At times on WATW's debut, Clay Stones, the similarity is frighteningly mimetic, and the references are almost always at least hovering on the horizon-- the menacing synths, the cold rhythmic precision, the heavily treated vocals. There's even a shared affinity for elaborate costumes, masks, and performance art overtures, taken to its logical extreme by WATW's counting among the group's official ranks a full-time dancer as well as a choreographer.

Clay Stones is unfortunately sequenced, front-loading the group's most derivative efforts to the extent that some listeners may be compelled to give up altogether before the album's latter tracks actually show WATW starting to find their own voice. The domineering sonics and dramatic pitch-shifting of opening cut "Foot Follows Foot" are ripped straight from Karin and Olof's playbook, as are the doomy vocal gimmicks of the title track, "Fight Song", and "Not in Death" and the shivering synths of "Fight Song" and "Afire".

Other minor influences may poke through from time to time, particularly in the vocals of frontwoman Megan Gold, who often evokes strident singers like Annie Lennox and PJ Harvey when her voice isn't being grievously manipulated. Still, not until "Clover and Dirt" does Clay Stones really start to point toward a genuinely interesting and individually sustainable artistic direction for WATW. That song's noisy, messy abrasion is a welcome change of pace from the icy over-compartmentalization that comes before, and the group approvingly carries it forward on the bruisingly anthemic album stand-out "Goya Monster" and art-damaged instrumental "Sweet Things Are So Hard". WATW certainly appear to have enough ideas of their own to carve out a unique identity, so it'd be a shame if they settled for being a glorified tribute act.